I said in the opening lecture of this series that one of the most wonderful features of the age in which we live, an age which will assuredly take its place in the Universal History of times to come as one of the most memorable of ages, is that the world is Romeless. I said too that this feature of the most modern times is, by one of the great cycles of history, a feature which takes us back to the earliest days of European life. The world from which Rome has passed away has something in common with the world in which Rome had never shown herself. It has something in common with it which it has not in common with those later ages during which Rome, in one shape or another, under one form of influence or another, was the acknowledged centre of all European and Christian lands. But this is one of those many truths which can be grasped only by those who look at European history as a whole, and who are not led away by the delusive voices which would teach them that this or that fragment of the unbroken tale can be mastered by itself apart from the other acts of the one drama. He who shuts up his books and he who opens his books at any arbitrary point in Rome’s long story are alike shut out from any true conception of the place of Rome in the world’s history; they are shut out from understanding the difference between an age in which Rome is and an age in which Rome is not. To their eyes the fact that the world is Romeless will not seem anything wonderful, anything distinctive, because they have never looked with any searching gaze at the ages in which the world was otherwise. Such an one will never see that the great feature of the most modern times, a feature which has reached its height in the times in which we ourselves live, is the absence of any such centre as the world so long gathered itself around. And if he will not see that the world is Romeless, still less will he see that even the Romeless world is not as though Rome had never been. Rome is still eternal in her influence; the world in truth has been for ages so steeped in Roman influences that those influences have ceased to be Roman. But Rome, as a visible and acknowledged centre, has passed away. No longer does an undivided world look to a single Rome as its one undoubted head. No longer does a divided world look to an Eastern and a Western Rome as each the undoubted head of half the world of civilized man. Rome œcumenical in either of her seats has become a thing that is no longer. The younger Rome has passed from us to be the spoil of the barbarian. The elder, by a fate at once more and less hopeful, has sunk to be the local capital of a single European kingdom. The younger, in her present distress, has the loftier hopes for the future. Her very oppressors have in some sort kept on her traditions; they have kept her in her old place as the head of something more than a mere local realm. We are far more likely to see Christian Constantinople again step into